The Hum

The most vivid memory I have of the last cicada visitation was being in the cemetery and watching them crawl across my dad's headstone, spending an unwarranted fraction of their short-assed lives clicking their brittle husks along his name and dates -- after seventeen years of their underground existence and as my dad was only seven years onto his.  It's as if the horde's only purpose is to show off their mastery and ownership of impermanence.  And, yeah, you little fucks... I get it.

The 1999 re-emergence was my first cicada invasion as an adult, and I was pretty fascinated by it.  It was the first time I noticed the three different layers of noise.  First, and most immediately, there's the buzzing of the nearest bugs with their distinct and discrete pulsations.  Behind that, there's the rattlesnake ensemble -- the angry cricket mosh-pit of rice-filled coffee cans which spells out the agitation in the closest trees.  And then, if you have a long moment in a quiet and still place, like, for instance, your father's grave, you'll hear the whirring hum which underlines the heaving hemipterian tide against which no human opposition, physical, intellectual or spiritual, will stand.  The third sound speaks to natural order, purposelessness and inevitability.

The day I was at the grave was June 21, 1999 -- the 30th anniversary of the day my parents brought me home from the adoption agency.  It was also my dad's father's birthday.   "I always think of you on June 21st," my dad told me once, after admitting, maybe in that same conversation, that he had a hard time remembering whether my birthday was on June 1st or 2nd.

It sounds like I'm slamming him for that, but I'm not.  My birthday was, to him, a date on a court document, not the day that his wife woke up in labor at some ungodly hour and they both rushed to the hospital and they had a dumb argument about where to park and they almost hit a deer on the way there.  MY day, to him, was the 21st, which established a throughline between his son and his dad and oh, by the way, on the year he died, June 21st was Father's Day.  Because that's how it goes sometimes.

I started visiting his grave on every June 21st.  Five years in, I skipped it so I could attend some family thing, and that family thing led to an unrelated argument, and that argument led to my proclamation that from then on, and I know this doesn't reflect well on me, June 21st would be the day that the rest of the world could just bite it.

And among those so invited to bone off was my father's ghost, because the evolution of my relationship with my dad, his ideas and actions has not, even as of the 2016 cicadaic  period, cooled and settled into an easily definable state.  I wasn't going to use my dad, or the feelings I had for him, which have regularly fluctuated between grief and anger, to justify the fact that I needed a day.

By the way, I don't need that day anymore because my work week involves plenty of isolation, so much so that I've occasionally ended my day hoarse from talking to myself.  But at the time of that decree, I was working with special needs adults, coming home and trying especially hard to be a present and positive father to my preschooler son and infant daughter, and spending every weekend visiting family.  I liked to think of myself as someone who could happily spend all of his time meeting other people's needs, but it turned out not to be as simple as just smiling.  I've never had drinking buddies, a poker night or a bowling league.  And when you don't have any free time, and I know everyone reading this has had this experience, you begin to fetishize the idea of free time, hanging a lot of unrealistic expectations on it which eventually grows resentment in you -- resentment which you have to hide at all costs because you are never more than an arm's length from someone who does not ever in any way ever deserve to ever feel resentment from you.  Ever.

Been there?  Of course you have.

For June 21st, or IDOG [1], as I came to call it, I established two simple rules.  "Get up early", and "Don't make plans."  The purpose of this experiment was to discover what I would wind up doing if I didn't have anything to do.  What I discovered is that if I am left to my own devices and allowed to do whatever I want [2], I wind up wanting to go home.  I returned home before noon on each of the seven June 21st's during which I exercised my IDOG privileges.  That's an instructive lesson to have in your curriculum when you feel put-upon.

That was my headspace as I was sitting amid the rattling bugs at my Dad's grave during their last occupation.  The cyclical nature of the infestation naturally led me to consider that I was halfway through two cicada cycles that were 34 years apart.  I speculated about June 2016, trying to imagine what my life might look like [3], and reflected on the June when the cicadas had last come: 1982 -- the last summer that my family was, in the larger sense, intact.

The best experience I had with my dad happened that year during a road trip to Wilkes-Barre to shoot in the Metallic Silhouette Regionals.

My dad was a profoundly talented position rifle shooter.  He was an alternate to the two-man Olympic smallbore rifle team in 1960, ranked 7th in 1956, 12th or so in 1964.  When his name came up among local shooters, you could almost hear Copeland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" fire up in the background.  Shooting was his thing, so much so that fate saw to it to saddle him with a second son who could not, despite that son's best efforts, summon even half a fuck to give it.  I hated position rifle shooting.  And that must of sucked for him.

But Metallic Silhouette Shooting?  With it's fresh air and sunshine?  With the satisfying clank of steel targets being knocked from their perch?  Where you just saunter up to the firing line for two and a half minutes, make the most of five shots and then just put the damn rifle back down and walk away?  Where you didn't have to remain motionless for an hour at a time, listening to your breathing and pulse in your foam-plugged ears, losing the circulation in your left arm, right foot, one or both ass cheeks and, invariably, your scrotum -- knowing that there was a four-minute nightmare of imaginary needles waiting for you during the inevitable hematological reintroduction?  Yeah.  In the face of leaving all that behind, silhouette shooting was baller.

I dug silhouette matches and the things that came with them.  I dug being on a pre-dawn highway or slipping in and out of fog banks on twisty mountain roads with the threatening pink of daylight's clarity on the horizon.  I dug listening to the clear channel AM radio stations out of Chicago and Boston.  I dug sunrise breakfasts at weird diners [4].  I dug being part of a tattered caravan and watching the men in it flirting with the waitresses in a way I can only describe as purposefully ineffectual.  I dug the coarse jokes and no-bullshit rhetoric of the troop.

To paint a broader picture of the weekend in Wilkes-Barre, I have this story which isn't really about my dad, but it captures the essence of his environment and what I like to think of as its social dynamic.

*              *               *

A lot of the guys on the trip had nicknames.  Jonathan King, for example, was Kingpin.  Dick Forsythe, a guy who had painted the fiberglass stock of his rifle orange, became The Great Pumpkin.  A guy named Roy Lions, whose name was never treated well by the native accent of southwest Pennsylvania, was was renamed with the question which always followed every mention of his name: "Roy Who".

Kingpin arrived in Wilkes-Barre with a mission: to find and establish communication with Lacy J Dalton, a country music star who was on the charts that summer and who had grown up in nearby Bloomsburg.  He set about this task with a couple rolls of quarters, the Wilkes-Barre regional white pages, a few drinks and unbound confidence.  After leaving his contact information with everyone in the book that might have been related to her, he turned in.

The next day, we returned from the match and found that Kingpin had, in fact, gotten a nibble.  A representative of LJD, had left a message that she was in town, was appreciative of her fans and would meet him in the motel lounge at seven.  And would it be okay if there were some local news cameras there because, you know, hometown press played well with country fans.  They'd call the motel and set everything up.  There was an assurance that all concerned parties were very excited about the event.

In particular, the most excited guy was the one who had made the call: Roy Lions (Roy "Who").  He'd posed at the representative and later reprised the conversation for a delighted ensemble of shooters and one thirteen year old boy.  Everyone was in on the joke but Kingpin.

Later, after we'd eaten, I was looking for a newspaper box out in the breezeway that connected the motel to its lounge and Kingpin happened by with a considerable spring in his step.  He put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Come on, Gregg!  Let's go meet Lacy J Dalton!"  And just like that, I had something that everyone on this trip except me wanted: a front row seat at Cruel Prank Ground Zero.

We entered the lounge and it was empty, not completely empty, but certainly emptier than it would be if there a country music celebrity en route.  There were no reporters.  There were no photographers.  Kingpin was looking around, and then at his watch, and then at the room, and the at his watch again as a hostess approached us.

"Just the two of you?  Is a booth okay?"

"Excuse me," he was still looking around, "did anybody call this place about a..." He was looking at his watch again.

"I'm sorry? Sir?"

"I talked to a guy.  He said there'd be some reporters?  Because...," he dropped his voice, "Lacy J Dalton is supposed to meet me here."

"I'm sorry.  I don't know anything about that."

"Would someone else be in charge of this?"

"I've been here since three.  No one has said a word.  Again, I'm sorry."

The confusion on Kingpin's face turned into something else.  He was quiet for a long moment and finally said, "He set me up."

"Sir?"  The hostess looked at me for clarification, but I just shrugged.

"That rotten..." He wasn't talking to either of us now.  He was just talking.  "He lied to my face.  All of those assholes lied to my face."  And then, he seemed to remember the hostess and faced her again.  "I know who did this.  I know exactly who's idea this was.  It was Roy Lions."

The hostess, a little nervous and obviously confused, asked, "Roy who?"

Kingpin moved very, VERY close to her face, pointed a finger at her nose and said, "Exactly."

*              *               *

Getting back to my dad.

He was a little older than the other guys.  He carried the considerable legacy of the Sport Shop, which seemed to claim everyone in an entire quadrant of Pennsylvania as loyal customers and regular pilgrims.  All this plus the marksmanship elevated his status in the group.  The impression I got, even then, is that the admiration that his peers had for him reached beyond the explicit things that drew it.  His friendship was coveted.

In example:  On our first night in Wilkes Barre, the guys were getting ready to head out for dinner and everyone was hanging out in someone's motel room.  They were watching a horse race.  There was some betting going on.

During one race, my dad pointed to a horse deep in the rear of the pack and said, "This is the one you want to watch."

"The hell are you talking about?"

"That's your winner."

"You wanna lose ten bucks on it?"

"Yeah, I'll take your money."

The room got quiet as everyone watched the horse rally in the last turn and sprint to a lead.  It won by a length.  The room went apeshit and the guy who'd made the bet, shaking his head in disbelief, handed over ten bucks.

"Jesus Christ, Barry.  You know how to pick a horse."

My dad, folding the ten bucks into his roll, said, "I don't know anything about horses.  I watched this same race an hour ago in my room."

I've replayed this incident in my head a thousand times.  I don't know exactly what, in that kind of circumstance, determines who becomes a dick and who becomes a hero.  I can't tell if it's the transparency of the punchline, if it's the craftsmanship of the trap -- being a subtle lure rather than a set of spring-loaded jaws, the total lack of excitement in my dad's voice, the almost superhuman vigilance of recognizing a horse race as one that you've seen before ... and remembering its result... I don't know.  Whatever it was, in that moment, as he must have been in others which I never saw, my dad was The Man.  There was laughter.  There was mock protest.  And behind all of that, in that deep, underlying cicadaic hum, there was amazement and reverence.

I was alone with Dad in Wilkes-Barre, which was unusual.  Commonly, my brother and I went on the excursions with him.  Being alone with him for that long wasn't awkward, but we didn't have a ton of common ground.  The small talk was weird [5].  We both loved country music, which my brother, a joyful and enthusiastic shooter, openly disdained.  At least in the chess game of gaining Dad's approval, my brother and I each still had a rook on the board.

My dad and I shared a mania for video games [6], although I now realize that to be less of a shared interest and more of a pathological compulsion, which tugs at me even now as I type on a computer where I am three mouse clicks away from an arcade machine emulator for which I have lovingly sorted and grouped the pre-1984 games into folders that bear the names of the arcades my dad and I would visit.  There was a weird arcade in the heart of Wilkes-Barre which was just a house.  With, like, a porch... and a kitchen.  Millipede and Defender stood where a couch had once been.  It was a little surreal.  We hit it twice.

This might be the sort of thing you misremember with time, but at thirteen, I didn't have any firm ideas about what my life was going to be.  I was looking to my dad as a template and I feel like that summer was as close as I ever got to becoming whatever he would have wanted me to be.

Now, as the cicadas return, I'm just about as old as my dad was the year after Wilkes-Barre, when it all kind of went to shit.  He would let a handful of manageable health problems get out of hand.  He would move out of our house and into the building where he ran his beer distributorship.  Some friendships would sour over business deals.  He would, in one fell swoop, betray everything he taught me about selflessness, commitment and integrity by leaving my mom for a college girl who looked for all the world like a young Al Franken.

None of that erased my appreciation of my dad's better qualities.  He was a tireless worker.  He answered questions.  He could be bluntly honest about his own mistakes, and discuss them without anger.  Anger wasn't an effective tool for him.

My dad's chief character-shaping tool was pointedly aggressive disappointment.  It's a low energy alternative to actually terrorizing your kid into behaving, and it's not available to every parent.  For disapproval to work, your kid needs to be seeking your validation, which, oh yes, I was.  Disapproval saves a lot of work and time.  You can just lay your disapproval at your kid's feet as they stand in the aftermath of their mistakes, whatever they are; bad grades, poor judgment, inability to keep track of and act according to their father's grudges.  It fails, though, in the long game.  There are consequences if you yourself fracture and corrode in the way that idols often do.

For instance, your kid might figure out that you used disappointment as a tool of first resort when you could have occasionally used forgiveness.  And he might figure out that you didn't intend to follow the code that you'd put forth.  And that kid might find himself, if he's alone too long with his thoughts, occasionally throwing a punch at the empty passenger seat in his car.

I'm attuned now to the near and maddening noise of the anger I hold for my dad.  Being a father myself has brought a few of his decisions into clearer focus, but others now seem so wildly reckless that I have to actively convince myself that they were arbitrary.  And to hear the persistent sound behind it all, the singing hum of natural, inevitable, purposeless admiration and love, the eternal absence of the small and joyful moments with him that I'll never have again, I have to spend an enormous amount of time being quiet and very, very still.

[1] Which stands for International Day of Gregg -- because I'm an asshole.

[2] Typically, cemeteries.  Sometimes, libraries.  Occasionally, old closed schools.  Always, Burger King.  Here's a journal entry from IDOG 2003:

8:11 am

My target BK is closed for good, so I’m on Jefferson Avenue, of all places.  Because I turn left on Murdock to go to work, I turned right.  If a character in a Springsteen song makes a wrong turn, it leads to adventure and forbidden pleasure.  I wind up at the Jefferson Avenue Burger King.  Not everybody has a Hungry Heart.  Some of us are just hungry.

[3] "It's the year you'll cry while watching the Tonys," is something I'd never have said.  Congratulations, Renée Elise Goldsberry!

[4] On the way to Wilkes-Barre, we did breakfast in a spacious and uncrowded 24 hour place that had been wallpapered with enlarged road maps.  Upon finding our current location and our destination, someone remarked, "Aw, Jesus, Barry... we're not even on the right wall yet."

[5] My dad had championed the family's purchase of an Atari VCS in 1978, which was visionary.  Ours was a wood grained six-switch model -- a "heavy sixer" as it now called by enthusiasts.

I had a weird moment when I first got my downtown milk delivery route where I parked along Penn between Fifth and Stanwix and knew instantly, with genetic-level certainty and homing pigeon acuity that this is where my mom, brother and I had sat in the car twenty-eight years earlier while dad went on a very serious, non-recreational mission to gain an Atari at Horne's, one of the only places you could find them then.

[6] He told me, out of god-damned nowhere, "I can see you as a smoker," which looped the hell out me.  I was a jumpy, timid, hypochondriacal kid, barely a teenager and reared by adamant non-smokers.  I pressed him on why he thought that and he just said, "I don't know.  I just see you smoking.  I don't think you should, but I think you might."  And then that was that.  My dad, who'd I heard brag about never smoking a thing in his life, never brought it up again.  I thought of it often in my twenties, with every pack of cigarettes I bought.